Tender Greensis a fast-casual, friendly restaurant that combines a fine-dining point of view with fresh, healthy meals in a relaxed environment. They work with small local farmers, artisans, ranchers, wineries and coffee roasters to provide the best quality ingredients from the local area.

The Challenge

With 17 locations, Tender Greens had three full-time employees handling accounts payable. The process was time consuming and costly. Many invoice PDFs were emailed to the Tender Greens team by vendors, where the team had to sift through emails, download PDFs, and manually enter the data into Intacct. There were many opportunities in this process for invoices to slip through the cracks, never to be processed. To make things more challenging, some invoices were uploaded to Dropbox where the team had to download and them, compare with the rest of the invoices to eliminate any duplicates, file, and organize. Tender Greens was growing quickly, now with 24 locations, and the current approach was simply not scalable with the number of invoices ballooning.

The solution

Tender Greens partnered with Plate IQ to streamline their accounts payable process. With Plate IQ, invoice PDFs are all sent to a single email address where all the data is automatically captured and uploaded into the Plate IQ system. From there, all invoice data is synced with Intacct. This new system removed both the manual data entry and arduous organizing and filing of invoices.

Results

After implementing Plate IQ, Tender Greens grew from 17 to 24 locations, but bookkeeping costs decreased by 50%. At the same time, the number of days to close the books at the end of the month decreased by 30%.

Plate IQ is an automated accounts payable solution that helps restaurants save time, improve the accuracy of their data, and gain insight into their expenses by automatically extracting data from uploaded invoices.